


(don't pay no mind to) the demons they fill you with fear

by bendingwind



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eighteen finds Clint on the coasts, building walls with other assholes who’ve given up hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(don't pay no mind to) the demons they fill you with fear

**Author's Note:**

> Intended to be a much shorter fic based on a tumblr prompt by asimplesong. Thanks to shadow243ali for the quick read-through, and I apologize for any typos that eluded both of us.
> 
> Title obviously shamelessly lifted from Home by Phillip Phillips (heh :D)

Eighteen finds Clint on the coasts, building walls with other assholes who’ve given up hope. Their world is doomed, after all; the walls will never keep shit back, and eventually the seas will all be poisoned, with radiation and bright blue alien blood, and the wealthiest of humanity will huddle inland while their last competent military men throw themselves down kaiju throats.

Clint kinda wishes he could be there to see those fuckin’ bankers realize what life was gonna be like now that they’d let all the plumbers die off, but he isn’t that kind of lucky.

For a wall-crawler, though, Clint doesn’t do so bad. He’s been out here since he was fourteen, lying on his applications to employment officers who didn’t care how old you were, as long as you were stupid enough and desperate enough to work on the front lines. He’s got a sort of instinct for it, by now; he was out of Florida just in time, skipped New York City the day before it got wiped out (again), and and scored work in clean-up and repair after both incidents.

It’s not a great life, but ration vouchers and old drainpipes’ll keep you alive if you know what you’re doing.

He’s in the ruins of Savannah, trying to bridge a gap in the wall between Charleston and the Florida Wastes when he meets Phil Coulson.

Phil is… different. He still lives in a house, an old one, well-patched and well-kept despite the wear of coastal life, and when he finds Clint sleeping in the ruins of a warehouse downtown, he invites him home. He feeds him dinner, real homemade stuff, not instant rice and rats roasted over a fire. He’s got books, which he lets Clint read once he realizes Clint _can_ , and paintings and suits and even a car, though he admits that it doesn’t run well anymore. Not many mechanics left in Savannah who can repair an old vintage sportscar. Clint imagines that the inland folks are probably a lot like Phil, calm and relatively unafraid, still hoping for some sort of future in all this.

Clint stays a week or so, surprised every day when Phil doesn’t tell him that he’s overstayed his welcome and it’s time to move on. When he can’t take the tension anymore, he slips out a window and heads south, figuring there’s always someone looking to hire a man who doesn’t care if the radioactive swamps make him grow another head, so long as he’s got food until that happens.

After Florida, Clint heads west, gets work building a wall farther inland, now that New Orleans is entirely gone and the coast all the way to Houston is going the same way. He likes Texas, always has; he finds the certainty of its small-town citizens that they can take a kaiju down with a tractor and a sawed-off shotgun hilarious and strangely endearing. He heads north awhile after that, but it’s not long before police start politely informing him that he ought to head back, there isn’t any work here, and then not-so-politely inform him that wall-crawlers aren’t welcome here. Finally, he gets far enough that they don’t give him a choice, and finds himself perched on top of a truck taking steel sheeting down I-40 with a promise of work on the other end.

And somehow, from there, he finds himself in Savannah again, hesitating in front of Phil Coulson’s newly repainted door.

“Hey there,” Phil says from behind him, before he can chicken out. “I admit, I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

Clint turns, and he’s surprised to find that Phil actually looks _pleased_ to see him, as if that’s any kind of reaction to have to a wall-crawling homeless hobo you barely know turning up on your doorstep. Again.

Clint only stays a night this time, but he at least eats breakfast with Phil the next morning and nervously informs him that he’s planning on heading north again. There’s talk of moving the wall further inland, leaving Rhode Island for the fish, and there’s bound to be work.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Phil offers, with an unreadable expression.

Clint shrugs.

“Wouldn’t want to overstay my welcome,” he replies, a little sheepishly. He helps clean up before shouldering his bag and his crossbow and heading out.

He finds work near what used to be Norfolk, and again just south of Maine after the Rhode Island rumors turn out to be bullshit. He spends months crawling up and down the east coast, finding work here and there, never staying anywhere longer than a handful of weeks. He winds up in Savannah more often than he should, selfishly stealing another comfortable night under Phil’s roof, eating his food and reading his books and enjoying his conversation and his pretty blue eyes. He turns nineteen somewhere on a highway in Georgia. Eventually he heads further up the coast and slips into Canada, where he runs into an out-of-work auto mechanic. He trades some of the squirrels and an astonishingly fat rabbit he shot for lessons in car repair, and then he finds himself, inexplicably, heading south again. He tells himself he’s not going back to Savannah, not planning to see Phil again, he’s just looking for work north of the Wastes again. Maybe after that he’ll slip into Mexico, see if he can find a more permanent position in the cartels, some stability.

He tries to pretend it’s a surprise when he finds himself on Phil’s doorstep again, rubbing the back of his head nervously as Phil opens the door.

“I have some ideas about your car,” Clint says, when Phil’s eyebrows lift at the sight of him.

“You need a shower,” Phil retorts, and steps aside so that Clint can come in.

Clint stays for a month this time, rapidly discovering that the mechanic’s lessons were relatively useless on a car decades older than either of them. Phil turns out to have some old manuals on engine repair, though, and eventually the car runs more or less without issue.

When he can hardly keep himself from kissing Phil over breakfast in the morning, Clint knows it’s time to leave. 

He does go to the Wastes this time, if only to prove to himself that it was never about Phil, that he still has some sort of choice in the matter. He works there for several months before he decides to head west again, maybe slip across the southern border like he’d planned, maybe settle in Texas with all those farmers and their delusions of grandeur. He can do odd jobs and slip into the big cities, mostly abandoned now, where he can steal all sorts of valuables left behind by rich oil barons and their wives to re-sell up in the interior.

Instead he finds himself heading north again, up the 95. It seems like a much shorter trip from this direction, and it’s sort of a shock to realize that, this entire time, Phil was really not far away at all. It’s spring when he arrives, glorious weather like he hasn’t seen since he was a kid, before the atmosphere got real bad. Phil is out in his front yard, kneeling in the dirt and… gardening, Clint realizes. He’s never seen it in person, unless maybe his mama used to do it before she died in the flu epidemic of ‘15. He sort of doubts it; she was a city girl through and through. Once his dad died, she took them back to the coasts even though everyone told her not to, because she didn’t really know anything else and she couldn’t afford life in the rapidly-growing cities safe in the interior.

Phil pauses, and Clint knows he’s been noticed.

“Why do you do it?” Clint asks, before Phil can turn around.

“Do what?” Phil asks calmly, sitting back on his heels. When Clint doesn’t respond, he turns around. His cheeks are flushed with a slight sunburn, and his shirt sleeves are rolled up to reveal muscled forearms with a light dusting of hair.

“Do what?” he asks again.

“Do… this!” Clint says, waving his hands at the house and the well-kept lawn and the fucking _garden._ “With the, the house and the meals and the _books!_ You have to have money, you can’t possibly be working here, you could be inland if you wanted, somewhere safe. Instead you live in an old house in a city that’s mostly destroyed and abandoned, and invite random scruffy hobos to come live with you and, and…” Clint’s words die away with a final dramatic flourish of his hands.

Phil shrugs.

“Why not?” he asks. “I haven’t given up on the world just yet. The people of the world accomplished a lot of incredible things when we were still squabbling over petty, tiny differences. I have never doubted for a second that, united, we will find a solution to this problem.”

He looks a little more flushed as he finishes, and maybe a little embarrassed. Clint doesn’t understand, can’t believe someone could possibly be so optimistic, and yet…

“Why me?” he blurts out. Phil could have asked any of the hundreds of wall-crawlers that passed through Savannah on a regular basis, sleeping in gutters and ruins while they looked for work in one direction or another. 

Phil shrugs again.

“You looked like you could use some hope,” is all he says.

It’s a bullshit answer, and they both know it. Just about everyone passing through here could use some _hope_. It’s a hopeless world, after all.

Clint nods at him, once, sharply, and then keeps walking down the road and out of sight.

He cuts through the interior this time, riding on freighter trucks and promising various law enforcement officials that he won’t be staying, he’s just heading to the west coast to look for some work that doesn’t involve radioactive swamps or weird, beautiful, too-nice men living too-nice lives in the fucking suburbs.

He makes it to the rockies before the news comes. Some crazy assholes still willing to crawl into jaegers pulled some insane stunt and they’ve closed off, of all ridiculous, comic-book-crazy things, a wormhole in the floor of the ocean. There will never be another kaiju on the planet again.

It’s… it’s ridiculous. 

Clint was only seven when they first came, hardly remembers life without them. Can’t imagine a world without seawalls and poisoned land. Can’t believe they’re not coming back. 

A nice family, overcome with generosity in the wake of their salvation, takes him in south of Denver. It’s all they ever talk about, in tones half disbelieving, but the things they say are so… stupid. The twenty-six-year-old daughter talks excitedly about being able to take her young children to the beach for the first time, and Clint doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the Hamptons are all underwater and mostly radioactive. The father, an old movie tycoon, speculates on whether Hollywood will relocate back to California or not. The brother speculates on whether they’ll leave the seawalls intact or not, and whines about how they’ll ruin the costal views.

Clint lasts two weeks before he can’t take it anymore. He plans to slip out in the night, but somehow the mother of the family finds out and shyly presents him with her brother’s old bike.

“Still runs,” she says, a little proudly, “he passed away in the San Francisco attack, years and years ago. He won’t be needing it anymore. Tom put a few bottles of extra gas in the back, in case you go through any vacated areas where you can’t buy any. There’s some money, as well. It’s not much, but...”

Clint takes it, gratefully, and hugs her. He feels a little guilty about how little he’s thought of the family, when they’d offered him a home purely out of the goodness of their hearts.

“So young,” she says, patting his cheek, and he’s surprised when tears seep out of her eyes. No one’s called him “young” in years, and no one’s cried over him since his mother died. It hits him that, before, nineteen would have seemed very young indeed. “Are you sure you won’t stay?”

He nods, a little numbly, and pats her awkwardly on the shoulder before driving away.

This time, he doesn’t even try to pretend he’s not driving back to Savannah. He drives straight through inland America, marveling at what he sees. Hundreds, maybe thousands of families are already loading their cars up with whatever they can carry, heading back to wherever they abandoned when the kaiju came. Clint knows that for most of them, it’s been over a decade since they lived on the coast. He can’t imagine what their lives must have been like, that they can so easily accept the safety they’ve been promised, can pack up and try to go back to their lives as if it’s nothing, when Clint can’t even quite make himself believe the news is real. How many rumors has he heard over the years, only to have another tiny bud of hope crushed?

Even so, he finds himself headed… home?

He roars down Phil’s street on the last of the gas and money he had, surprised to see an old victorian down the street already inhabited and under repair. Phil must hear him coming, and must somehow know it’s him, because he’s already on the porch by the time Clint cuts the engine and dismounts. He’s smiling.

“I told you so,” he says, but his voice is warm and hopeful and happy and not even slightly smug.

Clint can’t help but smile back.

“It’s really over?” he asks, and Phil nods, and somehow… that was what Clint was waiting for. Somehow the word of this man, this impossible man who hoped against all evidence, is what Clint was waiting for to believe.

“Will you stay?” Phil asks, before Clint can ask if Phil will have him.

“Yeah, yes,” Clint gasps. It’s like he’s somehow been holding his breath, all of these years, and only now are his lungs free to work properly again.

Phil’s smile widens, so that his eyes crinkle, and he steps aside to let Clint in.


End file.
